Kevin Can F**k Himself has shaped up into one of the great missed opportunities of recent TV history

Variety

Despite an inherently promising premise, Kevin Can F**k Himself is "a show that has surprisingly little to say about anything other than the particulars of its situation — one that ends up looking as loopily implausible as the set-up for a Kevin James sitcom," says Daniel D'Addario. "It’s easy enough to understand Kevin’s half of the equation. This fellow, when he walks into the room, defines his own reality and insists upon playing center of attention. He understands his life as a comedy in which his own bad behavior only cements his role as protagonist: So far, so simple. But what has increasingly felt like a stretch is Allison’s view of things: Her life when she emerges from Kevin’s shadow is defined not by sorrow or anger but by an impulse towards violent antisocial behavior that seems very familiar. Soon enough, she’s plotting to use the tools of crime, for which she has an unexpected aptitude, to take her husband out: Allison, in other words, is a TV antihero. She’s Walter White living in the Everybody Loves Raymond house. Which plays out less like an intriguing collision of genres than like substituting one set of clichés for another. This show’s difficult man is not a man, and she has spent much of her life trying to accommodate others. But that twist only takes us so far: Allison is such a radically different person when the mood shifts that it can be hard to remember the show is intended as a takedown of family sitcoms and not a gender-swapped crime story, full stop. That show — the show Kevin Can F**k Himself seems to want to be, about a woman driven to murder — would be as worth a try as any other, if given space and time to try to break out of the Breaking Bad mold. So why drag the sitcom into it?"